


to love this unknowable thing

by sam_roulette



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Freeform, Surrealism, The Vast Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), Yearning (TM)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:28:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28586484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sam_roulette/pseuds/sam_roulette
Summary: three authors' musings on the vast -- on devotion and its variant forms.(and maybe love? as a treat?)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	to love this unknowable thing

you can’t touch the stars. even if you devote yourself to the sky, throw your insignificance into the cosmos for the love of your God, the stars will remain as far away as they always have.

that’s the name of the game, of course. it’s the Vast or it’s nothing. the distance is put between you and the rest of everything as a threat, as a warning, and you love that space between the same way you love the dips between beads on a necklace, the spaces between your ribs where someone peering into the bars of your chest might sky your too small heart tucked away and fluttering fast hymns in its tiny tissue wings, lost in space.

they say if you’re high up and you put your hand out the window, your fingers will catch in the high altitude and play with God’s beard before you drive off the mountainside. the wind spoke to me when i was a girl and tried to launch myself off the swing and into the clouds. i used to ask it to blow for me and i liked to think it listened; but how much lovelier is it that our love of air and cold and vast gales coincided in just that moment, intimate to none but us and meaningless to the world? it didn’t hear me as a girl and doesn’t hear me as a man and never will no matter how i change, and i sing its praises regardless.

so you want to catch the sky in your hands. so you want to peel away a sliver of blue or a cloud or two, or you want to reach to the stars and pluck them like fruit, and it is temptation, and it is heartbreaking, and it is wonderful in turn. it is torture because it will never happen and because the stars are vaster than those little gems that fit under your tongue alongside the night air and because the distance keeps us all apart. it’s beautiful because we can still keep holding out our hands and hoping to snag even the smallest glimmer of eternity, even when there is nothing here to grasp with.

the stars are not for us. but we still reach.

\--

i stopped reaching, once, and my heart stopped alongside my hands. it asked me why; i didn’t give an answer. 

so it gently pulled my fingers, one by one, away from where they pressed at my tired temples. it ran them through my hair again, blew soft, cool air on my stressed nails and let me feel the wind again.

it whispered through my hands and through my hair, and it said no words for it has no mouth but i felt what it meant: “you are allowed to love unknowable things.”

i looked up from my palms and up to the clouds and i wept.

\--

The sea doesn’t need more tears to salt it but it’ll take them all the same.

There are kettle drums beneath our known waterways so loud that their pounding can be heard in the fragile little homes of hermit crabs hammered out of the inhospitable.

The rumbling is there even when our eardrums have burst, corpses of whales will fall long after the life has winked out of them.

We will never see them land, but we can always hear the thuds of their cadaver mallets striking against these ocean drums.

When the ammonites in our cochleas can hear it, they’re as lost as we are.

\--

we effect change in ways we neither know nor understand. these effects ripple outward just as they ripple inward. eventually they come back.

listen.

\--

and the sky’s the sea of sky and the sky of sea is the sea, with every direction skewing the compass and skewing us with it. looking down into the dark into the shimmering spin and twirl of sea angels brings the stars close only as illusions, as fragile as the glass between you, small and fragile creature of song and bone, and the whale shark looming overhead with its great white belly encompassing the sky.

you might fall apart at the seams and i might fall apart in turn because i knew the sea before i knew the sky, the way that a minnow knows the pond but only learns of the lake through tragic happenstance, the way you know me before i know you.

its a tragedy in the making trying to untangle itself and the meaning, but there comes a moment when you know. when the waves churn deep in the depths of the universe, stars watery and distorted against the grain of white noise sand and reflecting the entirety of the cosmos you will never know beneath your suspended feet, you will have the epiphany, the thought experiment coming to an end with the trickle of oxygen from your lungs, that sky and sea are one in the same in their vastness, in their loveliness, and in you.

you are made of that which makes stars and you are made of that which makes sand and corpse and life and gristle and rotting blood staining the gravity which carries you at a distance and carries the world away.

you are just another unknowable thing, vast in presence and scale, and you can love that which is unknowable.

\--

sometimes i look at you the sky and you the person and you’re both spinning, and i reach out my arms for you and you don’t reach back and i love you all the same.  you’re spinning and glowing, awash with jewels, and i spin with you and i spin alone until my legs lose track of my arms and i fall over in a half-drunk haze. i can feel laughter all around me, and i’m sure that it’s yours.

sometimes i look at you the sea and you the sky and you look like painted mirrors. i was both too young and too old when i first stepped inside the former and felt the ocean in three dimensions. my childhood heart felt so much fear in that pale blue cold that i still felt the waves against my legs that night, phantom surf on sleepless limbs, each wrapped around the other like silk.

“i don’t believe in soulmates but i do believe in similarity and boredom and home.” you the person told me that once and you the sky embodied it and you the sea wrapped me in it. i do not know myself and i do not know you the person or you the sky or you the sea, but i do remember this and i do know love.

also, i know this: i looked up at you before you didn’t look back, and i knew you first, and you know me, and neither of us knows the other. i hold this knowledge against my chest and i reach out my arms and i ask if you know it, too. i fall up; you fall apart. we fall into orbit and God’s beard tickles my hand.

**Author's Note:**

> i made our local jonkin writer read my poetry for this :-) poor thing
> 
> (Edit: the local martinkin thinks I'm able to tell what poetry even is and i have to laugh)


End file.
